The Robots Haven't Won - 'Smart Job' Nerds Have

PR's Planet Money host Adam Davidson onstage at the WIRED Business Conference Disruptive by Design in Partnership with MDC Partners at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 3, 2011 in New York City. Larry Busacca/WireImage.com

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The Robots Haven't Won - 'Smart Job' Nerds Have

PR's Planet Money host Adam Davidson onstage at the WIRED Business Conference Disruptive by Design in Partnership with MDC Partners at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 3, 2011 in New York City. Larry Busacca/WireImage.com

NEW YORK – The inexorable tide of tech improvements will continue to make blue-collar manufacturing jobs obsolete in the United States. Take the textile industry — we now have the tech to detect minute physical characteristics of fibers and match machinery accordingly, allowing one farmer in America to produce what it might take 800 farmers in China or Kazakhstan to produce.

But according to Planet Money host Adam Davidson, it’s not the robots that have won — it’s the nerds who control them.

"The areas where we do well are the areas where the labor component is a very small part of the price of a product," he told the Wired Business Conference. Because every piece of equipment needs to be up to par in these fields, employers need to hire very smart people. "It's worth it to them to pay more."

Manual labor-reducing technologies are new sectors of "smart jobs" where the contours are just waiting to be filled with creative, geeky individuals, Davidson said.

Between 2006 and 2010, the job categories that had the top percentage of gains in employees were internet, online publishing, and computer network and security, followed closely by wireless, e-learning, and nanotechnology.

The interesting thing about these creative jobs sought mostly by recent college graduates, Davidson said, is that much of the growth in these fields has in unlikely places. Like Downtown Omaha.

Before 1995, Davidson said, this was a place most creative types would abandon for the big city after graduation. But some recent grads decided to return to Omaha, rented some cheap factory space, and created a huge indie rock and film scene. Following this came nice restaurants, art galleries — "the kinds of amenities that people who live creative lives demand."

“In an area where the manufacturing community almost came to an end, Omaha is exploding. Now there's this thriving Omaha hipster scene which has real economic consequences for Omaha and the country, because there's smart, creative people doing work in the town.”

Yes, ‘smart jobs’ are on the rise in all kinds of unexpected places. For example, one of the largest clusters of IT jobs sprang out of Kansas City from its software development sector. Auto manufacturing jobs are re-forming in the deep South along the 1-85 corridor from Virginia to Montgomery, Alabama, you’ll find Hynduai, VW, and BMW plants. “These are really good quality jobs, often for laid-off textile workers, people who might have thought 10-15 years ago that their life was over.”

And while some were worried that the manufacturing of airplanes was going to go the way of the car — to China— Waco, Texas has proven itself as a nexus for aviation manufacturing. "If you want to be on the cutting edge of avionics, you can't be there waiting three weeks for a prototype to come back form Shanghai - you need to be next to the people who are making the goods," Davidson said.